“Careful, now.” He was tight against the back of her neck. “That way lies madness.”
Maybe an hour passed or maybe only seconds, but whatever the case, she knew she’d already been asleep. Maybe still was, although she’d remember it clear as a bell later.
“Where on earth did you come up with Yakima?”
“Huh? Oh. Stole it, actually. Met this . . . rodeo rider. Bronc buster. A real hot dog. Years ago, over in Kalispell.
“He was from Oregon, somewhere. Washington, maybe. Told me his name was also Enos and I should”—yawn—“change mine like he did. On account of the ladies. Something with more of a . . . snap to it.” He sounded practically etherized, slurring his words through the half-light of his own lazy slumber. “Just went ahead and used his. I ain’t even been to the Palouse.”
Years later, she would remember smiling against his arm . . .
2
She heard the yell of her name and a bang at the door, and she jarred into the wince of full daylight. The room was already hot, Yak already pulling on his pants, half hopping across the room. The door took another pounding.
“Hang on,” he yelled. “I’m coming.” He buttoned his fly and looked back at her. “So much for the rumor mill. Sorry.”
She half blinked against the light, half cringed against the blunt force of reality. Mouth like cotton. “Not your fault.”
“Sure it is,” he told her.
He turned the lock and Houston burst through like a G-man. Or maybe the wild man from Borneo—eyes the size of flight goggles, electrocuted hair. Waving around and babbling like he was speaking in tongues, something about it had finally happened, finally happened, that the end was here, and he wished he could go back and do it all differently.
She realized he’d been crying. She forgot she was naked, sat bolt up and immediately grabbed for the sheet when it slid down her chest. He didn’t even seem to notice, just went babbling on.
McKee had him by the shoulders. “Houston.”
He clammed up but looked wild-eyed around the room, breathing like a cornered animal. Finally he managed to fix on her.
“What is going on?” she said.
He spoke around his own ragged air. “It’s Ma. We got to get back to the ranch. She’s sick, I mean really, really sick this time.”
“Like headache sick?” said McKee. “Does she need to come in to the doc?”
“Doc’s already been out there, and it’s no headache. Thinks it’s her appendix. She might”—he sucked in another massive, halting draught—“she might die.”
Annelise shucked the covers entirely and spun her legs to the floor. She reached for her dress and underthings, all in a heap near the foot of the bed. “Where’s your father?”
“He’s out there. I came back with Doc Lipton.”
She got into her brassiere and got the dress over her head and reached behind herself and zipped as far as she could. Her shoes were in the kitchen and she moved toward them, then on second thought pushed McKee out of the way and took Houston’s hands. “What do we need to do?”
“Get back to the ranch . . . no.” He was nearly frantic with fear, goggle eyes ricocheting around the room again. “I just ran from the hospital to the shop and then over here. Trying to find you.” He found her eyes again and a whole other look of disarray came across him. “We need to get back to the hospital.”
McKee was pulling on a shirt. “Go start the truck. I’m right behind you.”
“Acute appendicitis, that much I’d bank on.” Doc Lipton ran his fingers through his crazy mop, tested the bristles on his cheek with his palm. He’d been summoned out of bed and straight to the ranch, and now here they were in his office, in what passed as the Big Coulee Hospital.
Annelise had seen him around but never met him. Younger than her father and definitely more rakish than doddering old Doctor Weems back home, but she wouldn’t trust either of them with emergency surgery.
Evidently he didn’t trust himself. “Look, these ain’t the old days of field experiment, learn as you go, whatever. We aren’t equipped to help her, is the upshot.
“Generally we’d try to farm this out to Deaconess down in Billings, but we’re up against a wall there, too—I just called down and the chief surgeon, Art Movius, is over at the Bozeman Deaconess. Training nurses.” Fingers in his hair again. He looked back and forth between her and McKee. “Rotten luck.”
“What are the options?” said McKee. Annelise turned to look at Houston and caught a startling glimpse of herself in a mirror on the wall beyond. She looked almost masked, with that streaked black makeup. A girl Lone Ranger. God, her hair had grown out, though.
“I’m working on it.” Lipton hammered his forehead with an index finger and looked at McKee. “You smoke? I need a cigarette.”
“Uh-uh. But the clock’s ticking, I take it.”
“Yeah.” He glanced at Houston. “Kid, you sure you’re okay hearing all this?”
“He’s living it,” Annelise said. “Better he hears it, too.”
The doc gave her a deferential nod and started again. “She was out there by herself all night and now this thing’s pretty far along. I can tell that by her fever and level of, ah, let’s say, discomfort.” He meant pain and she knew it and it was like he wanted to tear his own hair out.
“Thing is, even if Movius were in Billings, I’m not sure how easy it would be to get her there, at this stage of it. I was just down there a week ago and parts of that road are rough as a cob. Probably what we’d do is have him drive up here and use the delivery room as a surgery. Or maybe meet him partway in Roundup. Anyway, it’s beside the point. Movius ain’t in Billings.”
“Bozeman’s what, six hours?” Houston, the first time he’d spoken since McKee’s kitchen. But he seemed to have steeled himself.
“At least, and I know there’s grading crews between here and there, so you’d have to figure even longer.” He shook his head. “Even if we can get Movius on the road in the next five minutes, he’s a long way out.” He blew a long deep breath, as though he actually were exhaling a drag. “Look, push is coming to shove here. I may have to give it a try myself. Get her pretty morphined up. Strap her down and have a go.”
Houston stood. “How far’s Bozeman?”
Annelise looked at him. Maybe he wasn’t hearing any of this after all.
“Mile-wise, I mean.”
“Two hundred or better. It’s a clip.”
“Yeah, but that’s driving. West and then south a good ways, and then west again. How far as the crow flies?”
McKee got to his feet as well. “That would cut it in half, or nearly so. Like one-twenty, one-thirty? I’ve got a map in the truck.”
They were moving toward the door and Annelise hit her feet, too. “Hey. Hey.”
Both of them paused.
“You’re doing what I think you’re doing?”
“I’ve got that bird cruising at eighty-five an hour, no problem,” said Houston. “If we can get my ma in the front bay, we can fly her there in no time. He turned to the doc. “Clock’s ticking, ain’t that what you said?”
Lipton gestured at Yak. “Actually he did, but it’s a point. How rough a ride is it?”
“Depends. Cooled off good last night, though.” He shrugged. “Shouldn’t be any trick to get a couple-thousand up and sail right on over. Be a lot smoother than that bounce to Billings, and probably quicker.”
“You do have Bozeman Pass to get over. That’s pushing six thousand feet.”
“I just flew her past twelve. Not worried about six.”
The doc scraped at his hair again. He looked at Annelise. “This is probably our best bet. I can call Deaconess in Bozeman, get Movius on the horn.”
Why on earth he felt the need to sell it to her, she had no idea. “Can we drive her to the airfield, at least?”
“Waste of time,” said Houston. He started for the door again. “Yak’ll run me to the plane, you two get back to the ranch. Tie a white rag on a stick and go on up to the wheat table.”
3
She thought she could hear the buzz of the ship coming in and she shielded her eyes and scanned, and before she’d picked it out of the blue yonder a different glimmer caught her eye down below. She looked toward the county road and saw Yak’s white Studebaker, turning up the lane. He bumped over the cattle guard. Sunlight flashed on the glass.
The drone of the plane came on louder. She scanned again and found it, lower than she would have thought, coming in across the tables from the direction of town. Another moment and he cleared the house, just about the time Yak lurched to a stop beside the ambulance she and Doc Lipton had brought from the hospital, and also Pastor White’s black sedan. She saw the plane’s shadow appear across the front wall of the barn and then vanish again, like a silhouette passing a shade.
He descended light as a bubble, traveling so slowly she could hardly believe he stayed in the air, the sight so mesmerizing she nearly forgot to hold up the cloth. Just as he cleared the lip of the jump and passed, looking at her over the cowling through those goggles, she put the thing straight up over her head.
It hardly mattered. The hanky lay slack as a noodle. He accelerated and banked out beyond the far edge of the field, came around over the farm lot again and set down on the two-track at the south edge. He taxied out, bobbing across the shallow furrows, the stunted weeds blasting flat in the rush of the prop, then turned and smoothed out and cut the motor. He ripped the harness loose.
She went out toward him, her feet greasy with sweat inside the rubber muck boots she’d grabbed off the porch. Still in her dress, though, and still with the mask of streaked makeup around her eyes, which she could see in the ambulance’s side mirror the whole ride out.
Down in the house the atmosphere had been tense indeed. Aunt Gloria was fairly wringing herself and curled into a hard little knot, clutching Roy’s hand like a clamp but trying not to so much as whimper because even that triggered jolts of lightning through her middle.
Pastor White and a couple of men from the church were laying hands on her and praying. Doc Lipton had his bag open at the foot of the bed when Annelise left the house, prepping a morphine shot.
Houston hauled a gas can and funnel from the front cockpit, undid the cap in the wing, and started pouring. He had the tank topped before she even got there.
“Barely burned a drop, but still.” He handed her the can and jumped down, and they started back across the furrows. “What’s happening inside?”
“Sort of a two-pronged approach. Pastor White’s trying for a miracle, but the doc’s loading her up with dope.”
“We’re still on with this, though?”
“Hence the painkiller.”
“How’s Pop with it?”
Her heart was breaking for him. Roy was nearly as sweated-through as Aunt Gloria was, sitting there with her and trying to hold himself together, but white as that handkerchief she’d hoisted and no doubt riven with agonies all his own.
Fear, guilt, regret—she saw all of it, wished him none of it. When she’d only just arrived, he’d taken one look at her coming through the door and tried to speak to her and couldn’t at first, he was so choked up.
“He’s managing,” she said. “Scared out of his wits, poor thing.”
“But how is he with the Bozeman plan?”
“Oh.” They were hoofing it down the grade to the base of the jump, where she’d parked the REO. “He just asked if that’s her best chance, and the doctor told him it’s more like her only chance.”
He paused and looked back up the two-track to the wheat table, and Annelise looked too, but the airplane wasn’t visible from this low vantage. He kept looking, though. “It’s not even a question. Sure, if it were ninety degrees already I’d think twice, really damned hard.”
Finally he looked across the hood at her. “But it’s not ninety degrees, not even close. And what’s that old saying? God helps those who help themselves?” He shook his head. “I reckon there’s some kind of truth to it. If I don’t use what I can to help my own ma, there’s nobody to blame but me.”
“I understand. But I still wish this Doctor Movius were in Billings, where he belongs.”
Houston climbed in and fired the REO. “Got to eat what’s actually on your plate. At least we have an airplane.”
He put the spurs to her and barreled for the house, hitting ruts and dips a few times at such a speed the bench seat seemed to drop beneath them like the hinged floor of a gallows, only to slam right back up with a nearly tooth-cracking wallop. He had a death grip on the wheel and could tell Annie was hanging on for dear life beside him, one hand fairly welded to the edge of the dashboard and the other splat against the roof above her head.
He’d left the bungalow with Pop before six that morning, the both of them figuring it was sure enough time to come clean with Mother, just begin at the beginning, before the news reports started squawking through the radio and beat them to it.
He’d known something was amiss before he’d so much as passed the doorway. No coffee on, no radio on, not even the start of a fire, and a morning dawdler Mother was not. Headache, probably, although those usually came later in the day. The stillness, though—that struck him next, in the flash of time it took to find his own voice.
Silence, like a strange scent in the air.
The kitchen windows were closed and the place had an eerie bottled stasis that reminded him of something he didn’t at all want reminding of, and he fought the automatic workings of his own brain because he knew the unruly thing was even now trying to conjure exactly what he wished to avoid, the way he found himself wishing at times that he’d never seen that dead little—
Bingo. That was it. The stillness took him to the blank air in the crypt. He was afraid to move, afraid that actually entering the house and exiting this uncertain state would lead only to a place he couldn’t return from, and though he knew he couldn’t stand in the doorway forever, he realized that for right now, he’d rather stay terrified and hopeful than fully aware and doomed.
If by some miracle she wasn’t dead in her bed, he’d get right onto the straight and narrow. Be a better son, take better care of her. No more secrets, no more falsehoods. Please, God, please. He promised, he promised, he promised he would . . .
Behind him in the yard something banged like a shot and he jumped, practically out of his skin but definitely into the room. Pop, knocking mud from a shovel against the bumper of the REO.
He’d landed nearly in the middle of the kitchen. Ma?
He heard his name, faint as a wraith, so faint he thought it might be a figment of his own desperation. He held his breath. Then a sob from her bedroom, like the merest creak of a floorboard.
She was doubled up on the bed, barely able to lift her head. The covers trailed and her night shift was drenched with sweat and probably tears and for all he knew the release of her bladder, and quick as a flash he was back at the kitchen door roaring for Pop.
Mother was already on the stretcher when he slid to a stop and cranked on the brake. They had her wheeled to the back of the ambulance. He looked at Pop and Pop looked at him, and for the first time Huck could remember, his father simply looked old. Huck gave him a little nod, and the hard set of Pop’s mouth started to quiver, and neither of them could look away quickly enough. He didn’t know which way his father’s eyes went, but his own went straight to the gurney.
The drug had set in. She seemed half lost in a dream, with her breathing deeply steady and her eyelids fluttering. The doc was talking to her, telling her she was doing good, telling her she should feel some relief until they got her into good hands, and evidently she could hear what he said because she gave her own nod there on the pillow.
Little more than the flutter at her eyes or that quiver to Pop’s mouth, but he had no doubt he saw it.
He’d never considered that Pop might know the clutch of actual fear. Pop always just seemed like Pop, maybe caught between a push and a pull at times, but steady as a clock and amiable, too, even when everything otherwise went into a tailspin.
Huck stole another sideways peek. Now Pop was petting Mother’s shoulder, Annelise petting Pop’s, and the one on the stretcher seemed at the moment frankly in better straits than the one still on his feet. McKee stood a few feet away, oddly enough in some confab with Pastor White and the deacons.
Whatever the case, he needed to keep his own face on, just a bit longer.
“You all set?” Doc Lipton, looking at him. “We ought to get this show on the road.”
“One minute.” Huck strode for the house, leaned in and grabbed a pair of overalls from the line of hooks beside the door. He rolled them in a wad and came back into the still-rising slant of light, out of the cold shade of the porch. Somehow the day was hardly along at all. Doc Lipton and McKee and one of the deacons were lifting the stretcher, passing Mother into the back of the ambulance.
“Annie.”
She looked over from where she stood beside Pop.
He threw her the overalls. Not his oversize patched and frayed pair, but a new set actually sized to fit. Deep indigo, deep as some lightless depth of the sea. Pop had brought them to her days ago, when she moved out from town.
She caught them by one of the legs that had loosened from the wad.
“Put those on.”
“What?”
“I ain’t doing the flying. You are.”
She practically erupted. “NO, no no no,” she began, and he’d seen this coming and was already slashing a finger across his throat to shut her up. He hooked a sly thumb at Pop. They walked off to the side.
“I’d do it myself in a second if that was absolutely our best option. But it’s not.” He lifted the hem of his shirt. “What’s different?”
Her striped eyes shifted to his waist. “Your pants fit.”
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